Tag Archives: mental-health

Happy New Year: No Fakery, No Frills

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If I were writing a traditional New Year’s letter — the greetings that few people send anymore, now that photo-filled Shutterfly and Snapfish cards have replaced the lengthy recountings of successes and celebrations — I would focus on what went well in 2025. Like a Facebook post, my letter would paint a colorful picture of the past 12 months that is exuberant but only partly true.

Because it wouldn’t describe what has been difficult. Or sad. What has made me feel old and out of touch. Where I’ve been wrong, or felt wronged, or made decisions that I regret. The letter would broadcast, even brag, rather than reflect.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

As I write this, I’ve been home alone for two weeks over the Christmas holiday, mothering a tripod cat and two dogs who demand multiple walks a day. Outings with friends and a Christmas Eve gathering with my daughter-in-law’s extended family have been welcome distractions, but mostly I have kept my own company.

“I won’t feel happy all the time this holiday season,” a commentator wrote in a reflection about the 60th anniversary of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the timeless tale of an awkward boy who manages “to find hope” amid a season of mixed blessings. Author Abigail Rosenthal describes Charlie Brown as “anxious and depressed,” employing a lingo that today’s readers will understand. I find him to be honest and touchingly human, unafraid to acknowledge that this weighted holiday carries more expectations — whether religious or secular — than people can possibly achieve.

In that spirit, here’s what 2025 has really felt like for me. How it’s been, rather than what I want you to believe.

The first grandchild

How could the birth of Arthur on July 22nd be anything but a blessing? My younger son is a proud and attentive father; the growing baby came nine days early, and was a full pound and a half smaller than his dad, making labor and delivery relatively smooth; and he is healthy, alert and well loved. We are lucky.

One of the first times I fed him, as Arthur was transitioning to a bottle, I thought of malnourished babies in Gaza. When I left my son’s house, exhausted, after a five-hour babysitting shift, I wondered how overwhelmed, under-resourced single parents manage. Reviewing the photos I take every time I see Arthur, I push away thoughts of all that could go wrong, recalling my sister’s warning when I was pregnant with my first son: Once you have a child, you are always vulnerable.

What you love, you can lose. As a grandmother, in a role consistently described as relaxed and carefree (“you get to send the kids home!”), I didn’t anticipate feeling so unsure of myself, so afraid.

Heeding advice from my peers who became grandparents at a younger age, I have sought to be a helpful, loving presence. But transitioning from Mom to Grandma hasn’t come easily or naturally — I hadn’t held a baby in 30 years — and I’ve had to learn when to bide my time and bite my tongue.

“Do the dishes,” one young mother advised my older son as he prepared for his first visit with his nephew.

A traditional New Year’s letter would extol only the joys of being a grandma, and there are many. But it wouldn’t describe the generational tensions between how we Baby Boomers, the original helicopter parents, raised our kids and what our Millennial offspring expect today:

  • My son insisted that any relative who wanted to be responsible for Arthur’s care enroll in a grandparenting class at Amma Parenting, a women-owned center in an upscale suburb of Minneapolis where he and his partner had taken a daylong parenting class.
  • Given that my sons were circumcised right after birth, which my father recommended, I had to learn the particulars of cleaning an uncircumcised baby boy — and hide my dismay when my son described the procedure as genital mutilation.
  • I’ve abandoned the multicolored, gender-neutral baby blanket I was knitting because babies no longer sleep with blankets. Who knew? Recounting to my son how we tucked him in with a “blanky” and stuffed animals, I was startled by his abrupt response: “Arthur could suffocate.” Today’s babies wear a sleep sack and lie in a barren crib to prevent SIDS, the sudden infant death syndrome that took my husband’s second oldest brother.

What sometimes feels like zealous and unnecessary instruction — how to hold the baby, clean his bottles, push his stroller on a bumpy sidewalk — actually ensures that his parents will entrust me with Arthur’s care. In moments of insecurity, I wonder whether my son found me inadequate as a mother. Or has parenting just progressed and changed?

The only truth that matters is this: If I want a loving, respectful relationship with my grandson, I must set aside my ego and adapt. Healthy aging requires a willingness to learn from our grown children — as well as from our past mistakes.

A period of adjustment

My retirement in September and a deeper dive into volunteering are the other big news for my New Year’s greeting. As with the birth of my grandson, many hearty congratulations have come my way.

But for what? I enjoyed my career. I found purpose in work. It lifted me out of a difficult period in my 20s when I was floundering and making risky, unhealthy choices. And, combined with my husband’s astute investing, the income got both of our sons through college and allowed us to help with down payments on their homes.

Now, as a healthy (so far) retiree of comfortable means, I am supposed to build a life of leisure that runs contrary to my nature. Friends urge me to travel and read more books; and though I am doing more of each — including a first-time trip to London last April — I am noticing a cautiousness that has stifled me throughout adulthood, a tendency to default to the familiar.

Family wedding
June in Chicago

A leisurely ride on Amtrak to visit friends in Chicago and a stop in North Carolina last spring for my niece’s wedding enroute to see my older son in London were enjoyable, relationship-building experiences. But they didn’t stretch me. I didn’t challenge myself to take a solo train trip, which I promised myself I’d do after retirement. I didn’t immerse myself in a different culture or venture on a Civil Rights tour of the south, which long has intrigued me.

Even the warm-weather bike rides that I have loved for decades were on familiar pathways this past year. I never found time to haul my hybrid or road bike to trails and small towns throughout Minnesota, chatting with the locals along the way.

As for reading, it’s way past time to set aside the white women’s fiction that I enjoy and toe-dip into stories that will take me to new places, written by people whose backgrounds and perspectives differ from my own. Here again, I am learning from my younger son, who reads books only by authors from other cultures or with identities he doesn’t share as a middle-class, cisgender white male.

Reading widely means moving beyond your usual comfort zone to understand different human experiences and ideas. 

I thought retirement, given enough resources, would help me feel safe and secure. But challenge and ambition are what I always sought at work. Four months into freeing myself from paid employment, I recognize that the price of less stressful living can be sameness and stagnation — especially at an age when society warehouses seniors into dorm-like housing, walling them off from a community that could enrich elders’ lives and, in turn, benefit from their experience.

Not for me. Not yet. I am determined to live larger in 2026. How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?

Ready or not: Here comes retirement!

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It happened gradually, and it happened overnight. Over the course of two years — and then seemingly without warning — I have become ready, finally, to embrace retirement. Not to cease being physically active (ever!) or contributing as a volunteer. Not even to give up my quarter-time gig as an editor and nurturer of younger writers.

Instead, after more than 40 years of seeking identity and purpose and meaning through work, I have stopped defining myself as a careerist. As “what I do.” The question to answer now is: Who am I?

“Seasons change, people grow together and apart, life moves on. You will be OK, embrace it.”

— “Words From a Wanderer,” by Alexandra Elle

When I left full-time work in September 2022, at age 65, I would visibly stiffen whenever people asked me about “retirement.” Indeed, I defiantly declared in a blog post that my two part-time jobs qualified me as working — still in the game! —  especially since the positions utilized my skills and had professional sounding titles, which felt important to me then. I also defined retirement, in part, as the decision to draw Social Security, and I aimed to avoid that until I hit my full retirement age of 66 years and 6 months.

Fast-forward to today:

  • I left one of my two part-time gigs in early June, the one that paid better but was more chaotic and uncertain.
  • I opted to begin drawing Social Security when I turned 67, on July 4, and will receive my first check in August.
  • I have become more particular about the freelance work I will accept, turning down a potential offer that would have paid well for at least a year but had aspects that run counter to my values.

Back in February, I woke up earlier than usual on the morning I was set to give notice at my second job. As I sipped my café au lait before sunrise, I listened to a podcast about emotional intelligence in retirement. The speakers urged listeners to name their feelings and even state them aloud, like a 6-year-old: I feel sad. No, not that. I found a letter from the Social Security Administration in a neglected pile of mail, and I recognized a different feeling: I feel scared.

As well as humbled, helpless, hopeful. What comes next?

Where do aging people find community?

Twice last week, on consecutive days, I had rich conversations with women about loneliness and the meaning of friendship, about where we seek and find community now that our networks are shrinking, and our family responsibilities — whether raising children or caring for aging parents — are largely done.

One talk was with my widowed sister, who hasn’t worked in years (the workplace being a hub of socializing and people contact) and who recently moved from her familiar neighborhood. She plays Mahjong with her former neighbors and recently joined a cards group. That squares with advice in a New York Times article back in May, which cited research showing that adults on either end of the age spectrum may be vulnerable to loneliness — and can offset it by volunteering and joining groups.

My second discussion was with a longtime friend who is planning to retire early next year. I told her about the “Women in Retirement” group I had visited recently after months of finding excuses not to go. “The women all looked so old when I walked in,” I said, and then we laughed, knowing full well that the image I carry of myself in my head is not the one that looks back at me in photographs.

Starting from young adulthood, self-reported loneliness tends to decline as people approach midlife only to rise again after the age of 60.

— “The Loneliness Curve,” New York Times, May 21, 2024

Both conversations revolved around the gap between our own perceptions of our energy and vitality — the contributions we still hope to make in the world — and the diminishing way that people perceive us, if they think of us at all. My sister’s young adult grandkids see her as “an old lady,” she says, and rarely are in touch. My friend and I, who met 40 years ago in a newsroom, discussed the coming loss of a collegial community at work, even in a part-time job like mine.

Friendship was the topic at the “Women in Retirement” group last week, with a focus on the axiom that we have friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for life (credit a poem by Brian A. “Drew” Chalker). My small coterie of friends for life — the handful of people who know me as myself, not within a role or professional position — are friends I made back in my 20s and 30s.

Am I still capable of forging and investing in such deep and trusting friendships, or has it become easier to blanket myself in the comfort of people I’ve known for years? Time will tell; and time, I now recognize, in one of aging’s many insights, is an ever-diminishing commodity.

How do we reconcile our shifting energies?

During the four decades when I worked full time, full-bore — setting the “gold standard” for work ethic, one of my managers used to say — I had a standard answer when people asked where I was going on vacation: “Off the clock.” I’ve lived by a calendar and to-do lists for so long that I don’t know how else to operate. The part-time job, the one or two freelance gigs I always have going, the uptick in volunteering: All add up to days that feel nearly as full as the 50-hours-a-week career.

But guess what? It’s catching up to me. At 67, I no longer can summon the energy of a 45-year-old. So: Why do I still take so much pride in staying busy? I hear my late mother posing a question that annoyed me at the time: “You’re always running, Amy. What are you running from, I wonder.” Some part is habit. Some is trying to remain relevant (as though a person my age can do that in our ageist society). Some is denial. An even bigger part is fear.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Professor and historian Heather Cox Richardson recently observed that “democracy is a process, and it’s never finished.” I feel the same way about retirement. To concede that my work life — and productivity, as I’ve defined it — is behind me, to accept that family, friends and volunteering are what can bring me peace and purpose, is to take a giant leap into the unknown.

“There is always something truly restorative, really, finally comforting, in learning what is true. In coming to the end of an illusion, a false hope,” wrote Sue Miller in her 1995 novel “The Distinguished Guest,” which I just finished. If I sit still long enough, I can name the illusion, even as I wince at its futility and hubris — the conceit that I could outrun and outwit age.